It will cost more for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant along with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.
According to a customer email shared with Hacker News, Anthropic said that effective today, April 4, at noon Pacific time, subscribers “will no longer be able to use their Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses, including OpenClaw.” Instead, you’ll have to pay for additional usage through a “pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”
The company is launching OpenClaw starting today, but says the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolling out to more devices soon.”
Boris Cherny, head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, wrote about
The announcement comes after OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger said he would join humanity’s rival OpenAI, which remains an open source project with support from OpenAI.
Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk rationally about Anthropic,” but were only able to delay the price increase by a week.
“It’s funny how the timing matches up: first we copy some popular features into a closed harness, and then we lock down the open source,” Steinberger said.
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However, Cherny claimed that Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he “has only submitted a few (pull requests) specifically to improve OpenClaw’s out-of-the-box cache efficiency.”
“This is about engineering constraints.” He added that Anthropic is still offering full refunds to subscribers. “We know that not everyone realizes that this is not what we stand for, and this is an attempt to make that clear and unambiguous.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI recently reportedly shut down its Sora app and video creation model as part of a broader effort to free up computing resources and win over software engineers and enterprises that increasingly rely on products like Claude Code.
